Flagellation of Saint Jerome

The scene comes from a dream Jerome described in a letter written around 384. He had been reading Cicero with more pleasure than he read scripture, and in the dream he was hauled before a judge who told him he was a Ciceronian and no Christian, then ordered him beaten. In this painting the beating is done by angels. Zurbaran made it around 1640 for the Hieronymite monks of Guadalupe in Extremadura, part of a cycle for their sacristy and the chapel beside it, and the cycle is unusual in showing the order's own men rather than the familiar saints. Spain was coming apart in those years, with revolts in Catalonia and Portugal and a crown that could not pay its armies. When the monasteries were dissolved in the 1830s the monks left and the paintings did not, and they are still on the walls they were made for.